[_dwt]

It's a major bummer. When I first read the story (a few days ago, maybe?) I thought it was an interesting metaphor that didn't quite line up with the observed details of software development with AI. I assumed the writer was a journalist or author with a non-technical background trying to explore a more "utopian" vision of where trends could go.

Without the inferred writer, it's much less interesting to me, except as a reminder that models change and I can't rely on the old tics to spot LLM prose consistently any more.

[abeindoria]

Surely you see it's somewhat unreasonable? As if it was written by the author you disliked, and until you knew of the fact, you quite enjoyed it.

Quite honestly, I do that sometimes too -- but I _know_ that it's unreasonable.

[_dwt]

For me, “interestingly wrong” becomes just “wrong” without human thinking behind it. I wasn’t bowled over by the prose, I just thought it was an uncommon take and didn’t twig the signs it was Claude product.

[vincnetas]

Can i compare this with fucking inflatable doll (not done this, just extrapolating). Even if senses for your penis are identical, whole experience is totally not the same as doing with another live person.

[y0eswddl]

hard to form an emotional connection with the emotionless

[idiotsecant]

Says parent post, while thinking a stack of rocks that looks a little like a fat raccoon is kind of cute.

Humans are designed to form emotional connections with non emotional things. Its sort of our whole deal.

[y0eswddl]

Yes, but, that goes away when the "thing" is meant to mimic/replace/replicate a human... that's why "uncanny valley" is just a gut-level unsettling feeling. The lack of emotional nuance.

[cluckindan]

Humans are definitely not designed.

[abeindoria]

Eh, People form emotional connections with inanimate objects, so I'm unsure if that's a good enough argument tbf.

[zarzavat]

A djungelskog is not a threat. AI threatens my livelihood and my humanity. The worst part is I have to use it regardless because I would be uncompetitive without it.

[nikkwong]

What is it about it that makes the story less interesting to you? It's the same story, down to the same delicate details. When AI-slop stops being, well, slop, and just is everything that humans do, but much better, and much more efficient—will we have the same repulsion to it that many of us do now?

I find it interesting to ponder. We look at the luddite movement as futile and somewhat fatalistic in a way. I feel like the current attitude towards AI generated art will suffer the same fate—but I'm really not quite sure.

[devin]

What is your understanding of the luddite movement? I ask because I don't believe many are aware that luddites were not anti-technology. It was a labor movement which was targeted at exploitation by factory owners. Their issue was with factories forcing the use of machines to produce inferior products so owners could use cheaper, low skill labor.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/luddites-definition-wrong-la...

[lubujackson]

Stories are particularly troubling because we have the concept of "suspending disbelief" and readers tend to take a leap of faith with longwinded narratives because we assume the author is going somewhere with the story and has written purposefully.

When AI can write convincingly enough, it is basically a honeypot for human readers. It looks well-written enough. The concept is interesting and we think it is going somewhere. The point is that AI cannot write anything good by itself, because writing is a form of communication. AI can't communicate, only generate output based on a prompt. At best, it produces an exploded version of a prompt, which is the only seed of interest that carries the whole thing.

Somebody had that nugget of an idea which is relevant for today's readers. They told the AI to write it up, with some tone or setting details, then probably edited it a bunch. If we enjoy any part of it, we are enjoying the bits of humanity peeking through the process, not the default text the AI wrote.

[nikkwong]

Right, but in the present case we have exactly what you're describing—a story, almost fully written by AI but with some human cherry-picking in the mix. And readers are finding it a phenomenal story and then wanting to vomit retrospectively in learning about the authorship. It just seems patently obvious to me that this is not where the sentiment is going to stay—it will hit the margin, like the people who decide to not own a cell phone, or those who would rather listen to analog audio; there will be a market for it but it will exist at the margin. Eventually, especially for young people, more and more of what they consume will be AI generated and they won't care because it's indistinguishable from human work.

Or, I digress, it will be distinguishable from human work but because it's so much better than anything that a human could have ever created. These AI tools that we have now are as dumb as they will ever be. If we ever reach AGI or superintelligence or whatever—or even if not, even if these tools just advance for 10 more years on their current trajectory—it's easy for me to imagine some scenario where the machines can generate something so perfect to your liking that you just prefer it to anything a human ever would have created, storytelling and all.

You can take the general case where AI can just generate a better movie than a team of humans ever could plausibly generate. After all, AI doesn't have any of the physical constraints of a movie studio—the budget, the logistics of traveling from location to location, the catering, the fact that the crew has to sleep, has to coordinate schedules, all that. AI, with some human involvement or not, could just keep iterating on some script on a laptop overnight until its created an optimized version which is more satisfying to humans than any other human made movie ever created. Or in a narrow case it could create the perfect movie for you, given what it knows about you and your interests. All human movies would look inferior.

For my kids, who I'm sure are going to grow up in a world where this type of art is embedded everywhere—and where the human version is almost certainly going to be worse—I don't think the desperate cries to see the last scrap of human ingenuity will mean anything. All of these people throwing rocks at Waymos and others boycotting companies for generating ads rather than shooting one with a video studio; it's so obviously helpless, desperate and obviously futile in the face of what's coming.

I mourn the future that seems plausible here but I also welcome it as inevitable. The technology is coming, and people are going to have to adapt one way or another.

[guitarlimeo]

You're talking about content. Only content can be "perfect" as you say.

When I'm listening to music, looking at art, seeing a play or a short film I want to feel connection to the humans behind it. AI is by definition missing that connection. That's what makes me retrospectively vomit at AI writings like these. That connection requires that the humans behind it are imperfect, the solo can have one or two sloppy notes, but at least it's genuine interaction. We have seen this same yearning for connection with all the "Don't use LLM to comment, use your true style of writing with its flaws" rules.

I'm 100% certain mainstream studios will be producing "perfect" content with AIs just like current mainstream pop stars have 10 ghost writers working on each song to create "perfect" songs. The good stuff will exist in the fringes as always and I'm ok with that as I've already been for years.

And the future may not be as settled as you think it is. Leaders try to sell you their vision of the future by saying it is settled and that things are certain, but that is because they want you to believe that, because if you and the masses believe so, it's more certain for the future to settle the way the leaders want. But you can also actively refuse that future and find a different future that's worth believing in yourself.

[donkeybeer]

The riff comes first, the people come second. One of the nice things about punk and metal is how anti celebrity in a fundamental way both genres are. In histories of the genres, you will usually find such and such band made such and such invention that led to certain new structures being accessible. Of course the social background of the scenes where it emerged is important too but the history is traced first in terms of the riff. Or aka books like glazing a particular rockstars life history are rare, even though there are some "superstars" in metal and punk. The culture is very "only analog is real, digitals fake shit" but idk in some other ways they seem much closer to having not much difficulty accepting a valid musical work regardless of origin.

[guitarlimeo]

I don't quite understand what you're getting at with this comment? In metal and punk it's pretty cornerstone of the genre to be authentic, and in metal to value human skills (all the solo parts, fast playing). I've played and listened punk and metal my whole life, but will also enjoy early Lady Gaga, Eminem, Kendrick etc. celebrities because I recognize their authenticity and skills. Sabrina Carpenter and Drake go over my head because of blatant ghost writing and even though they have good tunes, I vomit retrospectively.

So what is AI bringing to the fans of these genres that the fans might value? Because it's not authenticity nor is it skills. What is the point you're trying to make?

[short_sells_poo]

Are you an AI? This looks like it was at least ran through an LLM judging by the heaps of em dashes.

[nikkwong]

Nope — you can browse my HN comment history and I've been using em dashes far before LLMs were a thing

[short_sells_poo]

Ah sorry, fair enough. I guess you were, are and will have been getting this question quite frequently :D

I used dashes quite frequently in the past, but stopped using them to avoid being associated with llm generated text :(

It's a shame really, because it is a useful gramatical tool.

[NateEag]

That's all speculation, and it may prove to be true.

But:

> readers are finding it a phenomenal story

is not true across the board.

I thought to myself, explicitly, and fairly early "This is a fun and thoughtful idea, but the writing is kinda crap" before I realized (maybe a third if the way through) "ah, right, this is genAI. That tracks."

Despite my deep-seated hatred of LLMs, I choose to finish the piece and see if I was being unfair to the actual work ("the output", in the soulless descriptor used by programmers who've never once written a real story or crafted a song).

As a longtime avid reader of fiction, lit nerd, and semi-pro musician, I understand writing and artistry better than the average HN poster, and couldn't help but see the flaws in this.

People who don't have deep knowledge of literature don't catch the tells or flaws as well, but are still understandably angry when they find out they burned their time reading clanker output, and are understandably depressed that they were suckered into it because they haven't spent a lifetime developing a deep understanding of the discipline.

It's possible that genAI approaches will surpass humans in every field we invented.

So far, though, in every field I understand deeply, I see the uncanny mediocrity of the average in every LLM output I have subjected myself to.

[bjt]

You can get some good guesses from the comment itself.

> I assumed the writer was a journalist or author with a non-technical background trying to explore a more "utopian" vision of where trends could go.

If you assume you're reading something from a person with intention and a perspective, who you could connect with or influence in some way, then that affects the experience of reading. It's not just the words on the page.

[smcin]

This reminds me of having the reverse experience with the 2017 New Yorker viral "Cat Person" story [0] which a (usually trustworthy) friend forwarded and enthusiastically told me to read: waste of time shaggy-dog story, intentional engagement-trolling aimed at the intersection of the hot-button topics of its target readership *. But why are we culturally expected to allow more slack to a human author, even a meretricious one? Both are comparably bad. The LLM-authored one needs a disclaimer at the top to set its readers' expectations right, then readers can make an informed choice.

(* "Cat Person" honestly felt like the literary equivalent of Rickrolling; I would have stopped reading it after the first page if not for my friend's glowing endorsement.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27778689

[smcin]

(Sorry, the correct link for Roupenian's 2017 story "Cat Person" is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15892630 )

[moron4hire]

Oh god, that was insipid.

It had a very similar quality to the AI'd article from this thread. A sort of attempt at Being Literary but never really ever getting to the point of saying anything. It has the same feeling of wallowing, of over indulging in its shtick.

[the_axiom]

the story is bad in itself and doesn't add anything to the reader

but if you knew it came from a human it would be interesting as a window to learning what the writer was thinking

since there is no writer such window doesn't exist either

[moron4hire]

Yes, this is a thing. Bad writing with an interesting idea underneath it all is still interesting if it comes from a human because we have the expectation that the human will improve in how they share their ideas in the future. In other words, we see potential.

But LLMs don't have potential. You can make an LLM write a thousand articles in the next hour and it will not get one iota better at writing because of it. A person would massively improve merely from the act of writing a dozen, but 100x that effort and the LLM is no better off than when it started.

Despite every model release every 6 months being hailed as a "game changer", we can see from the fact that LLMs are just as empty and dumb as they were when GPT-2 was new half a decade ago that there really is no long term potential here. Despite more and more power, larger and hotter and more expensive data centers, it's an asymptotic return where we've already broken over the diminishing returns point.

And you know, I wouldn't care all that much--hell, might even be enthusiastically involved--if folks could just be honest with themselves that this turd sandwich of a product is not going to bring about AGI.

[the_af]

Very well said.

You cannot even get angry or upset if you disagree with anything in the story, maybe the author’s despicable worldview permeating through the characters... because there's no author’s worldview, because there's no author. It's a window into nothing, except perhaps the myriad of stories in the model's training set.

I want to at least have to option of getting upset at the author.

[ijk]

Someone prompted it to write that, and then posted it, so I suppose there's a meta-author to get upset at.

It's kind of an abandonment of having a worldview, outsourcing it to the AI.

[weaksauce]

i don't find the luddite comparison accurate. they were against looms and anti-ai people or ai skeptical people are against the wholesale strip mining of intellectual property as it exists... both public domain and non-public domain. it's used to enrich the capital class at the expense of the workers. sure it's similar but it certainly didn't have the copyright and wholesale theft of all of the human ideas behind it. it just feels quite different.

[gzread]

they were not against the loom itself, but the resulting widescale changes for the worse in the way society was organized

[y0eswddl]

c'mon, were they really just against the looms...?

[kevin_thibedeau]

People had a revulsion to eating refrigerated foods. The developed world got over it. We're comfortably on the path to becoming Eloi who will trust everything the magic box does for us.

[bluefirebrand]

> We're comfortably on the path to becoming Eloi who will trust everything the magic box does for us.

And if you've read literally any science fiction you will know the myriad ways that could be absolutely terrible for us

[the_af]

> When AI-slop stops being, well, slop, and just is everything that humans do, but much better, and much more efficient—will we have the same repulsion to it that many of us do now?

For me, the answer to this riddle is very easy: I want to engage with other human minds. A robot (or AI) doesn't have a human mind, so I'm not interested in its "artistic" output.

It was never about how good it was. Of course AI slop adds insult to injury by being also bad. Currently. But it'll get better. My position was never that AI art (shorts, pictures, music, text) is to be frowned up because it's bad. I don't like it because it's not the expression of a human mind.

It's a bit like how an AI boy/girlfriend is not the real deal, no matter how realistic -- and I'm sure they'll get uncannily realistic in the future. They aren't the real deal because there's no real human behind the facade of companionship.

[_dwt]

As a couple sibling comments said, I took it for an insight into the way an optimistic writer might see AI software development becoming a new form of "end-user programming" or "citizen developer" tooling. I'm personally too deep in the weeds to ever see it becoming empowering in that way (if nothing else, this will be an incredibly centralizing technology and whoever wins the "arms race" [assuming we we're not in a bubble destined to pop soon] will absolutely have the possible Toms and Megans of such a future by the short hairs). But I love end-user programming, or whatever we're calling it now! (I was partial to "shadow IT" - made it sound really cool.) So I enjoyed the idea that somebody saw AI as a "bicycle for the mind" in that sense, even if I feared they'd end up disappointed.

But there was nobody there, and I'm only disappointed in myself for not noticing.

[jplusequalt]

>What is it about it that makes the story less interesting to you?

Read my comment below for a perspective.